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Sunday, February 04, 2007

Floating Floors, Back Ups and my obsessional worrying.....

The latest obsessional things rocking my world.....

The Floating floor:In the world of Richard, everything is grounds for obsessional behaviour and most things are fair game for me to worry obsessively about. But one of the worst things I choose to panic and fret about is the house. I did it at Birmingham, worrying about everything and anything, cracks, creaks, slipped tiles, water, drips. You name it, I will obsess over it.

And in a new house it's even worse. Whereas in the old house, I pretty much knew that, bar major earthquake, nothing was going to bring it crashing down. It had survived over a hundred years, it was pretty solid.But a new house is something completely different. All those stories of cracks suddenly appearing, all the new creaks and moans, all the strange little things that only seem to happen because it's a product of our fantastically rubbish construction industry are all fair game to keep my mind worrying.

Of course, it does help to have people in similar circumstances and people who know about houses.A friend of ours tells us tales of spending the first year going around filling in all the cracks in the house and then having to go round in the second year and re-fill the filled cracks. By the third year he gave up and is only now thinking about finally going round and sorting them out.And we do have "the builder's daughter" on the end of the phone issuing reassurance and key buzzwords.For example, since moving in I've always been a little worried (ie obsessively fretting) about the floor in the office. It seems to move and creak a little too much for my liking. Phoned up builder's daughter - Floating floor says she. Perfectly normal says she. Nothing to worry about says she.So I have now stopped worrying.

Which means it's onto the next thing.Back-Ups.I've always been really particular about backing up all the stuff on the computer. Zip Discs for essential data. CD-Rs for essential data & pictures & music. Not one but two external hard disk drives for backing up the entire hard disk.But since I moved all the music in Bruton mansions over to hard disk and the i-pod it's only gotten worse.Strangely enough I can remember feeling this way when i was much younger about music on tape. I'd very carefully make back up tapes of all the original tapes I had, jut in case.And likewise, with the advent of digital music and having music only on hard disk, rather than cd, I've become obsessive about having many copies.

The latest thing was a worry about formats.When I put it all onto the computer and the i-pod I copied it as AAC files, playable just by Apple and I-Tunes. Lately this has started to worry me. Sure for most music I've got the original cds as a back up. But what about all the music that I haven't got the cds as back up?Of course, all these tracks are backed up onto both hard disks and onto CD-R but what (and this is where it gets really ridiculous) if one day I won't be able to play the AAC files? What if Apple suddenly goes bankrupt and stops supporting the format?

So now I've spent a while getting all the music without original cds converted into mp3 format and I've put that on both hard disks and CD-R as well.

Like I said, I realise this is ridiculous and silly. And in some way, my knowing that it is silly makes me think (hope) I'm not turning into a raving loon quite yet.

But then again, what if mp3 stops being supported. Maybe I should have them backed up onto a third format just in case......???????